The Great Wreck

by Stewart, Jack

  “Well, now,” he said quietly, “It’s a fair question. Let me tell you what I needed to do…” And quick as a fucking snake, the bastard was on me. I should have seen it coming, I should have noticed how James had been closing the distance between us, how he shifted the way he stood so he could get within arm’s length of me. His fist flashed out in a blink connecting with the side of my head sending I burst of pain and light through my skull.

  I dropped my rifle and clutched my head as the blows rained down on me. Eventually James landed one to my injured ribs sending me to the asphalt clutching my side and struggling to breath but James didn’t stop there as he proceeded to kick every square inch of my body. I curled up in a ball trying to protect myself. I thought James was going to kill me right then and there. But like I said earlier, James had other plans and finally the blows came to a stop.

  I could hear James panting as he said, “Stuff you wouldn’t understand you goddam pecker tickler,” he heaved as he nearly collapsed against the trucks back tire, “Any more questions?”

  I thought about the pistols strapped to my hips. I didn’t have any more questions but I thought I had an answer. I thought I might have a fair shot at getting one of them unholstered and pointed at that demon’s head and might have just enough time to put a bullet or two through the wriggling mass of insanity that passed for James’ brain.

  He must have sensed it, must have saw it in my eyes for in a flash he was up and on my with his own pistol pressed against my temple with the hammer cocked, “You want me to do it you useless granny fondler? Want me to spread your prissy little brains all over this fucking road, you goddam turkey jacker? I will do it and I swear that to god,” he said with his acrid breath pouring into my face and sweat dripping down his nose.

  “Do it,” I said, “Do it right now.” I didn’t care. It would be a painless end and I would be able to escape James, this world, and the dead forever. Either James would end it now or I’d be packing sand away from this nut farm as soon as I had the chance.

  James laughed and un-cocked his gun, “I guess you learned a thing or two out there in the Great Southwestern Wasteland. Like maybe how to grow a tiny, tiny pair of balls,” he said. James seems to read my mind and say, “However, don’t even think that you can ditch me you little sack packer. I can track you anywhere you go. Don’t believe me? Then consider this. I left you in Phoenix, what, three weeks ago? I got here long before you, made my way through a fucking million dead people, countless burning towns, and I still nearly put a bullet right up you scrawny ass. I can do that anytime I want. Got it?”

  I just lay there waiting for the pain to subside glaring at James.

  “Oh, I’d say you got it so why don’t we get moving. I think I know a place where we can crash for a few days before heading north.”

  I slowly got to my feet and picked up my pack, holding my ribs tight with my arm. I thought again about pulling my pistol and blowing the back of James head clear off but then he turned and winked at me and I knew I couldn’t do it. Not just yet. So bruised and beaten, I followed James into the mini wreck that was downtown Las Cruces.

  We moved down the highway. James was looking neither left nor right, just trucking along like he owned the world and nothing here could hurt him. It occurred to me that he moved like a man who had thoroughly scouted out the area and knew where he was heading. Even if I knew every square inch of the place I wouldn’t be moving so brashly. I kept my head moving around looking for dead drifting along the empty streets, looking for dead in the corners and shadows, looking at everything and everywhere waiting for something to jump out at us.

  James? Not at all. He walked on like he owned the world which was why it was so satisfying when a blue and pink blur shot out from an ally and knocked James over, relived him of his guns, and placed the business end of a very large bore pistol against his head. I just stopped and stood there partly because I was too shocked that James had just been thoroughly unmanned and partly because of who had done it.

  The girl had James pinned with his right arm pulled behind his back with her right hand and the pistol pointed at the base of his skull with her left, “Who are you!?” she screamed at him, “What the fuck are you doing here!?”

  I’ll give James credit. He may be crazier than a syphilitic sixty year old whore but he was quick and smart, “Travelers, sweet thing, just travelers. And if you’re so intent on wrapping your legs around me, let me roll over and we’ll get in the right position.”

  The girl pulled James’s arm up a little higher indicating that she did not approve of his suggestion. She had a shock of blond hair done up into two spiky pig tails, pale blue eyes that looked at me over a button nose and full lips that were set in a hard line. She wore a tight tank top that was stenciled “Fuck the Dead” with a vest full of ammunition clips and a pair of low cut shorts that could generously be described as…well…short. Daisy Dukes if the original Daisy Duke had been looking to display a whole lot more of her flesh. The girl caught me out of the corner of her eye and pointed the pistol at me, “How about it kid? Gonna tell me who you are or do I tear your friend’s arm from his socket?”

  I pointed at her shirt and smiled, “Hope you don’t mean that literally. You might catch a disease. I could see the ghost of a smile appear on her mouth, “And I highly recommend pulling Mr. Frank’s arm free from his socket. Might do us all a favor.” James glared at me for the asphalt. I thought he’d try to make me pay for my comments later, but I didn’t plan of giving James the chance.

  “I don’t think dead men can get it up.”

  I blushed and cocked my head to the side as though thinking about her observation then said, “What do you think, James? I don’t think she should be asking any questions do you? None of her business, right? I think I’ll keep our little secret, you know? Mums the word.”

  James swore at me, “Well, well, well. Mr. Big Britches’ balls just got a little bigger.”

  I watched the girl and could see the look of confusion on her face. I looked around and still could see no dead but I didn’t think that would last for long so I sighed and said, “We just got here. We came from Los Angeles and are heading to Sandia. The greasy, white trash stink bag you have pinned in James Frank. I’m Thomas Greenly.”

  She pointed the pistol back at James’s head but released his arm. With her now free hand she pulled out a radio and spoke into it, “Birch, this is Marti. Over.”

  “Go ahead Marti,” a male voice replied.

  “I’ve got two guys here. Say they are headed east. Say they just got here. I believe the kid, but the older guy, well, I think he’s lying.”

  “OK, Marti. Hold tight. We’ll be there in just a few minutes and then we’re gonna have to get inside. Another wave is heading our way. Should be here in a half an hour.”

  I heard the girl swear, “Another wave? What the fuck? Are they having some sort of convention up north or something?” she said, “OK, well we’re over by the Whataburger. We’ll just hold tight and wait for you to pick us up. Any company nearby?”

  “Nope. It’s all clear from you to here.”

  Another wave. The man on the radio must be talking about the dead, “Shouldn’t we move indoors?” I said looking down the roads that headed south expecting to see a wall of dead heading our direction but it was still and empty.

  “Nah, Birch and the crew will be hear in just a minute. Are you two brothers or something? I know brothers who hate each other like you do but you two don’t sound like friends.”

  “Oh, we’re the best of friends, honey pot,” James said resting his head on the gritty asphalt, “We’re like peas and carrots. Captain and Tennille. Donny and Marie.”

  “What the fuck is he talking about?” Marti said looking at me.

  “James had spent far too much time in the desert and the crazy little rat that serves as his brain has up and died.”

  “You sure got cocky, you fucking McKnobber Jobber. Just wait until this little hen is off my b
ack, then we’ll see if you’re still up to running your mouth,” James turned his head and looked at Marti with his right eye, “And the next time I’m between your legs, it’ll be you screaming, sweet snatch.”

  I saw the blood rush up into Marti’s face as she pulled up on his arm. James screamed as she leaned forward and hissed at him, “You mean like that?” I was really beginning to like Marti.

  She let off the pressure on his arm and James spat back, “Oh much louder fuck cake. I’ll plant your daisy and you’ll limp for a month.”

  I think Marti might have torn his arm lose right there but we all heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Even James shut his yap for a minute and looked around to see where it was coming from. It had been so long since we’d actually heard the engine of a car. And since the dead zeroed in on noise, we were both nervous but excited to see the machine, an actual operating relic from a lost civilization.

  When the car rounded the street corner, it turned out to be a van. A large twelve seater with government plates and the New Mexico state seal on the side doors. Inside were three well-armed men who stepped out of the van as soon as it stopped while a woman sat at the steering wheel and kept the motor running.

  “We got to move quickly, Marti. Go get in the car,” a tall, lean man of about fifty said as he snapped a pair of hand cuffs on James and pulled him to his feet, “Grab their gear,” he said and looked at me, “You need a pair of cuffs or are you going to behave?”

  “I’ll behave,” I said, “He won’t,” pointing to James as I quickly moved to the van and climbed in. The three men hooked James to a loop in one of the seats as I dropped my gear to the floor and pulled on the seatbelt automatically. I heard Marti giggle as she climbed in behind me.

  “I didn’t think you’ll get a ticket for not wearing that,” she said.

  “Old habits, “ I said and laughed at myself but kept the seatbelt on, “Safety first.”

  The two men jammed James in between them in the front seat as the woman hit the gas. It was a strange sensation actually riding in a car after so long on foot. We sped through the dead town and I marveled at the empty buildings and burnt out wrecks flew by. The woman expertly navigated through the blockages in the road and soon pulled up to a massive, concrete gate. I craned my neck to see the top of it as she honked twice. The gate slowly parted and she gunned the van in. The gates closed behind us as the women drove the van down a street completely cleared of cars. I looked around at the enclosed area. It was surreal. Everything was neat and clean as though the collapse of the outside world had never happened.

  I could see a few large buildings surrounded by smaller ones and behind those a large concrete wall on all four sides. I could also see other gates on the west and south side where cars had been stacked up against them. The south gate looked as though it had been blasted off its tracks and hastily repaired again.

  The van pulled up to the largest building, turned left, and went down a ramp and into an underground parking lot. The door slowly closed behind us cutting off the bright desert light. I could still see though: all along the perimeter of the parking garage were narrow windows that let in the light. It still freaked me out with all the dark spaces and shadows potentially hiding the dead.

  Marti read the look on my face and said, “We cleared them out a while back. We checked every nook and cranny then sealed off anywhere we couldn’t crawl into just in case. We did that for all the buildings here in the Green Zone after we got the gates back up and sealed. It helped pass the time.”

  The men pulled us out of the van and marched us down a flight of stairs and past a set of doors marked “State Police Office, Las Cruces.” Uh oh.

  Uh oh indeed. The men marched us past those doors, down a dark hallway and right into a pair of holding cells. At the sight of the cells, James started freaking out, “Don’t you fucking put me in there you bitch chompers!” he screamed as he kicked and fought like a crazy devil, “I will fucking tear out your guts if you put me in there!” he screamed, “I will cluster fuck every one of your twice then shit on your corpses!”

  Bitch chompers? That was a new one.

  One of the men applied the butt of his rifle to the back of James’ head cutting off his raving. James fell to the ground like a sack of bricks. They tossed his limp body in one cell and were about to toss me in the same one when I said as calmly as I could, “Would it be possible for you to put me in a different cell? One a few doors down?”

  I think that did more to convince these people that I was not like James than anything else. The man who had put James down looked at me with a small amount of sympathy and said, “Sure, kid. We can do that. And don’t worry yourself too much. We won’t keep you here long. Just until the Doc gets a look at you. Make sure you’re not infected.”

  “You might want to keep James in here longer,” I said as they closed and locked the door behind me.

  “You guys aren’t friends?” he asked.

  “James doesn’t have friends only people he uses.”

  The man nodded as he hung our gear of a nearby set of hooks, “Doc will be done in a bit. He’s up on the third floor with a couple of our tech nerds watching the fucking dead streaming up from the south. You can rest down here. It’s safe. There’s some food and water under the cot,” he said then headed out of the holding area.

  I sat down on the bed and pulled out a jug of water and drank deeply. I set the jug down and saw a few cans of spam, soup, and tuna with a tiny packed of mayonnaise and some plastic spoons and forks. In the corner was a toilet. An actual toilet! I wondered if it worked.

  I went over and flushed it and to my surprise the water whooshed down and was refilled again so I undid my zipper and peed for what seemed like an hour, zipped up and flushed the toilet.

  I felt almost human as I laid back on the cot and listened to James breathing and mumbling in his cell. I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying but it sounded a lot like, “Goddamn retarded ass jockeys. Put me in a fucking cage? I’ll put you in a cage. Along with your groceries. And your mother. Maybe your cousins, too. Goddam goat-fuckers…”

  I chuckled and hoped they never let that fucker out. I actually felt safer than I had for months. I had a concrete wall on one side and three walls of bars around me locked tight. There was no way the dead could get me. If they got in I might die of thirst or hunger but I wouldn’t be eaten. It was cold comfort but it was better than nothing. With that thought in my head, I fell into a deep sleep.

  I woke up sometime later and saw that James had managed to crawl up on his cot. I ate a can of spam and saw that the three men had left us alone. I finished my can of spam and heard Marti came in. She pulled a chair up to my cell, spun it around, and sat down in it with her legs spread.

  Holy crow.

  Her cutoffs were so short that I could see, well, almost to Christmas. If she spread her legs any further, I might have trouble concentrating. She looked me up and down for a full minute.

  That made me nervous, those steely blue-grey eyes judging me, evaluating me as though I was a horse to be bought or a steak to be cooked and eaten.

  “Is my fly open?” I finally said.

  She looked directly at my crotch for another good, long spell, “Nope.”

  “Do I have a second head growing out of my shoulder?”

  “Nope. Just wondering what you story is.”

  “Same as yours, I imagine,” I replied, “One day going to school, the next dead start eating the living. Family dies, friends die, all of Los Angeles dies, the world dies, and I get stuck with the one in a hundred million, fucking psycho who’s still left alive. We get out of LA and head east. We hear there’s a place called Sandia where a safe haven’s been set up. So here we are.”

  Marti nodded, “That’s about right. Except my mom and my little sister are alive. They are already up at Sandia. They were up there when the shit broke out. I have two brothers in New York that are probably dead.

  “Your dad?”

>   Marti just shook her head.

  “What’s his story?” she asked pointing towards the prone figure of James.

  “I don’t really know. I don’t really care. Over the past few days I have determined that James and I will be parting ways as soon as I can arrange it.”

  Marti nodded again, then stood up, “Doc will be down when he can to give you a look over, then he’ll let you guys out.”

  “Marti? Don’t let James out,” I said.

  “That’s up to Doc,” she said as she made her way to the door.

  “Hey!” I called. Marti stopped and looked over her shoulder, “Did I pass?”

  Marti smiled and said, “Yep. See you later.”

  I smiled too and lay back on the bunk. As I made my plans to ditch James, I surprised myself a fell back into a dreamless sleep for hours.

  * * *

  Sometime later I woke up to James screaming at the top of his lungs, “Let me! The Fuck! Out of here! You goddam pecker sniffers! You shit eating donkey diddlers! Let me out of here you bunch of duck fucking, sack nuggets! Right now! Right fucking now!”

  And so on.

  I didn’t know if our hosts could hear James and he didn’t seem to care and continued on his rant for what must have been an hour until he finally lay down on his bunk. Even from three cells over in the half-light I could see he was shaking, “You ain’t got no right!” he yelled at the bars around him, “No fucking right at all!”

  He looked over at me and whispered, “Something to see here, pork muncher?”

  “They might keep us in here forever, James,” I said in response, “Might keep us locked up for the rest of our days.”

  James jumped to his feet like he’d been shocked, “Shut the fuck up! They have to let me out. They ain’t got no right!”

  “Who’ll stop them? The police? A judge?” I asked, “No one, that’s who. They’ve got the keys and were in the cage. That’s all the right they need,” I said as I lay back on the bed and watched James bounce around his cell like a rubber ball, “Hell, I kinda like it. I think maybe I’ll ask them to keep us here for as long as they like. Maybe,” I said watching James shoot daggers at me out of his eyes, “Maybe I’ll tell them we’re killers. What do you think? Real bad asses that’ll kill them in their sleep if they let us out. What do you think about that James? Think they’ll like to hear that? I think I can convince them to throw away the keys to our cells and we’ll just die in here nice and quiet like. That’s what I think.”